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Saturday, July 15, 2006 02:06 AM
Flanker
2.0 Next Year In Jerusalem!
Pre-Flight
Briefing
Flanker
2.0 so long in coming and so damn beautiful it makes you hurt, but is that
all it takes to win in today’s marketplace? Is it possible to take a 4
year old sim, add drop dead gorgeous graphics call it a day and have it be a
150,000 unit seller? And if the company decides re-release Flanker 1.5 with
terrific graphics and they charge higher than normal prices (49.00 dollars
at EB compared to other games 44.00) should the user expect the sim to work
at least as well as the earlier series. Shouldn't
the AI, Flight Model, Weapons and such at least not lose any ground to the
earlier series..? Shouldn't the bugs from the earlier series have been
banished? And if its a graphics upgrade shouldn't the graphics be done to
the same high standard for at least the 3 most popular chipsets...? Well I
know the answer is yes to all of those questions, but I still bought the
damn thing. Flanker is like some sultry Russian woman whose eyes and long
beautiful legs promise much but she never gives it all to you...always
holding something back. Other women kiss you....she holds your hand...always
using her eye's to promise what might come soon. I know I wont be returning
my copy.
Here
are my thoughts after buying it, not really a review cause I don’t think I
can be dispassionate about the sim. I waited too long and my hopes were too
high for this version to be dispassionate. So take what I say with a measure
of caution, you are listening to the rants of an old Flanker fanatic that
wanted much more. Also SSI
knows there are problems witness the read me where for the first time I can
remember a sim maker has admitted that they released the program with bugs
and are working on a patch to correct it. I don’t know whether to admire
their candor or wonder what the rush was to release the sim.
When
we were in Beta testing for Flanker 2.0 I remember the day I saw the hype
for Flanker 2.0 in a magazine, “Falcons Beware: There's a new bird of
prey on your tail”. I distinctly remember thinking of a Jim Croce
lyric, “You don’t tug on Superman’s Cape, you don’t spit in the
wind, and you sure don’t mess with Jim”. To think that Flanker was
attempting to be such an overachiever with such a limited set of features
was extremely interesting to say the least.
I figured that unless SSI/Eagle Dynamics whipped out a seriously big
can of Whoop ass in the form of a bunch of heretofore unseen features that
Falcon would be unthreatened, after all Falcon matches Flankers strongest
point, her flight model. (Actually I believe that Falcons landing model is
much better). Strangely the
Cheerleaders of Flanker get upset when the sim is compared to Falcon, but
isn’t SSI doing that themselves?
Walking out to the aircraft and
shaking it all about…<VBG>
Brought
it home and was delighted to find that I did not suffer the same problems
that many Voodoo 3 users were experiencing, the crash after the intro
scenario. The solutions offered to Voodoo 3 users so far: “Your
drivers”, “Delete the Intro folder”, “It works on mine, your
computer sucks, meaning you suck”, “remove DirectX 7 always a blast”,
“install DirectX 7”, “change your desktop to 16 bit”…..Not fun
stuff. Delete the Intro folder
seems to work the best. Anyways who wants to watch a bunch of F/A-18’s get
smoked by anyone. But major points off for being such a pain in the ass to
start for users that I have never heard complain about non starting sims. I
tested this sim on a Celeron 366 oc'd to 458mhz, I have 128mb SDRAM, Twin
Voodoo2's latest Reference drivers, Aztec PCI A3D Vortex soundcard, with a
550mb Permanent swapfile.
Apparently
SSI/Eagle decided that 3dfx users should basically get the short end of the
stick, odd considering how many 3dfx Cards are out there. From posts and
rumors it was clear that no one at SSI had any idea of what it meant to
claim the sim to be 3dfx Compatible. So it’s no surprise it was
broken on many 3dfx machines to start with…and its even less of a surprise
that some of the graphics within the sim are basically screwed up for 3dfx
users. You get less detailed cockpit graphics (instruments are blurry),
blurry camo’s when viewed from outside, broken cockpit reflections and
other nonsense. At one point it was claimed that the cockpit was blurry due
to the limits of the 3dfx Chipset…the dreaded 256x256 texture limit.
Nonsense…a glance at the World War 2 Fighters cockpit using the 3dfx is
enough to dispel that belief, if it isnt consider that I have already fixed
much of the poor workmanship on my install. If it can be done in WW2
Fighters than we should get nothing less in Flanker, and if little ole me
can be fixing it then there truly is no excuse.
A third party is working on improving the cockpit clarity which
unfortunately makes one wonder about the veracity of those who claim that
the blurriness is caused by the texture limits of the 3dfx.
Naturally a texture sized at 512x512 WILL look better for details, my
contention and I have proved this by improving the camo textures is that SSI
did not give the 3dfx users the best textures that were possible with the
256x256 texture limit and the reason is....???
There
are some rumors that the problems revolve around some need to rush the
product out the door (it’s a little early for Christmas) and the fact that
SSI never did seem to have much of a grip on anything to do with the 3dfx
Chipset.
This is evidenced by the extremely poor conversion of existing files to use
the 3dfx Chipset along with the claim of 3dfx compatibility. It almost looks
like someone just tried to reduce all the files from 512x512 by a fixed
percent causing some files like the Russian Knight Texture below to be
conveniently sized at 128x128 making it the blurry mess it appears on 3dfx
cards...other files are reduced to 5k from 17k...wha for...? I believe that
a mistake was made in the rush to release and instead of converting the 10
or so files that needed to be reduced for 3dfx Compatibility they just took
the folder and ran it...course that is wild and rampant speculation but
again being faced with a file that was reduced from 17k to 5k for no
apparent reason is bizarre.
Lets
be clear, its not about speed...I carefully benchmarked the frame rates
before and after I replaced and fixed all the files in my Flanker2 folder.
There is not one whit of difference....so its not about a speed issue. Its
just carelessness and its a carelessness that seems to be a recurring
problem in the sim in other aspects. It almost looks like it was rushed, but
how can you say that about a sim that was 4 years in the making..? One more
note about the AGP implementation, there really aren't that many files that
were over the 256x256 3dfx Limit. The amount of time needed to get those
files up to snuff would have been insignificant compared to the 4 years we
waited for this graphics upgrade. Flanker 2.0 is a graphics upgrade at
its core and yet probably the most popular chipset was broken right from the
release...say wha..!
Here
are some examples of the rushed work in Flanker, on the left hand side the
default 3dfx Textures, on the right hand side the fixed versions done by no
expert, me....<VBG> See how much clearer the files on the right
are (you have to click on the thumbnail, knucklehead hehe). We could look at
this like Nixon and say the glass is half full...but hey I didn't buy a do
it yourself sim. Besides not everyone knows how to fix this stuff.
  These
are big files to attempt to not lose too much quality. Keep reading and let
them load.
RUSSIAN KNIGHT TEXTURE
All graphics are taken on a 458 Celeron Twin Voodoo
at 1024x768 resolution.
This is easy stuff
to fix and if I have time I will either post the files I have fixed or do a
tutorial on how to fix them.
  .
EUROPEAN
2 CAMOUFLAGE
Next page of my thoughts
on Flanker..
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